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If you have been managing Blackberry Enterprise Servers for some time, you’re probably familiar with the well known problem of Blackberries not being able to send/receive emails after an Exchange server reboot unless the BES server is also rebooted or the Blackberry services are restarted.

What happens in the background is that BES loses MAPI connections to the Exchange server and is not able to re-establish this once the Exchange services come back online. Exchange service restarts can happen for any reason, Windows update, someone manually restarting the server and forgetting there’s a Blackberry server to reboot as well. (Does this remind you of someone?)

If your BES uptime monitoring is like most people, you probably have telephone alerts set up. It’s a sophisticated kind of monitoring where an annoyed user rings up saying, “My Blackberry isn’t working. I thought this was being monitored?” You come up with something nice to say, probably apologize for this happening too often (what else could you say, customer is king!) and tell them the Blackberry should start working in no time. Then you restart the Blackberry services, and everything is hunky dory again. Well, until next time.

But can you really do this every other day? Especially if you’re a managed service provider managing dozens or hundreds of Blackberry servers?

SOLUTION

I was asked to attack this problem and I took two approaches, proposals for both are under technical review at the moment with our NOC team.

This solution involves setting up a startup script on Exchange Server. This script will use psexec to remotely execute a script on the Blackberry server which will restart the Blackberry services.

However, before calling the remote restartBes.bat script using psexec, it will call a local VBScript Wait.vbs which will do what? It’ll make execution wait for 5 minutes so Blackberry services will be restarted after a delay of 5 minutes. This allows the Exchange Server to fully start up, see the network and start its services first. You can modify the delay as per your environment. The code below is the code you use for startup script on the Exchange Server.

The code below is the code you will use for Wait.vbs which will need to be placed in C:\Scripts on the Exchange Server. 300000 is the wait time in milliseconds which you can change.

WScript.Sleep 300000

The code below is the code you will use for RestartBes.bat which will need to be placed in C:\Scripts on the Blackberry Server. The correct order to stop and start Blackberry services has been taken from Blackberry KB13718.

You may or may not have the Blackberry Monitoring Service installed so 4 of these services may not exist on your system but the script will work regardless.

2. Use an event log monitoring tool to look for events that are logged when this problem happens and restart Blackberry service when the relevant events are logged.

Blackberry Enterprise Server 5 generates application log events 20709 “Failed to reach user’s mailbox” for every user. The idea is for the monitoring tool to restart Blackberry services if this event is seen more than X number of times in Y number of minutes, say 5.

Additionally you can configure your monitoring tool to send an email when this happens or if it has to restart the services more than 2 times in a 30 minute period which shows there may be a bigger problem needing human intervention.